The role of caves in the history of archaeology has been crucial from the beginning of the discipline itself as a science, in the XIX sec.: «caves soon came to be regarded as significant archaeological resources, valued in particular for the common stratification of their deposits which facilitated the relative chronological ordering of faunal remains and cultural material [...]» (A. Bergsvik, R. Skeates (edd.), Caves in Context: The Cultural Significance of Caves and Rockshelters in Europe, Oxford 2012, 28).
Rock art, as well, has always been regarded with great interest by the scholars for its immediate and auto-intuitive connection with the non-material, spiritual world of the human communities of the past (often otherwise completely lost). Rock art has even been the way the modern western society discovered the existence of the antiquity of manhood (J.D. Lewis-Williams, The mind in the cave, London 2004, 26ff.)

Caves (together with shelters) dominate the Sicilian archaeological record from the beginning: no open-air site is known in literature until Neolithic times.
In some of the caves with archaeological remains a significant (both qualitatively and quantitatively) record of rock art is preserved.
A first main aim of the PhD project is to make an inventory and record the prehistoric art within the caves and shelters of Sicily (both rock and mobile art).

But as stated above, rock art research and cave archaeology can also play a crucial role in the interpretation of social and cultural significance.
Referring to various theoretical approaches that revolutionized the rock art studies in the last 30 years and that have not been applied to the Sicilian record yet, a second main aim is to attempt an integrated analysis of the prehistoric art of the island in its diachronic perspective, with a focus on the environmental and landscape reconstruction.
By Collecting the information available in the literature concerning the paleo-environment and the paleo-climate and organizing a small scale excavation campaign to retrieve high resolution paleo-ecological data, I am going to use art as a proxy for the analysis of the relation between the communities that produced it and the different aspects of the material and non-material lives of those very communities: from the environment they lived in to the Weltanschauung they had.
A macroregional perspective will also be taken: by searching for possible common trends (conservative or progressive) and common themes in the artistic production of the Mediterranean region in the given period - as proof of a cultural milieu and of the travelling of ideas (together with people) - I argue that the known role of Sicily as crossroad during the late proto-historic and the early historic times, could find its roots already in the post-LGM periods.